Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen

By Christopher Phillips and Louis P. Masur

Bruce Springsteen often prefers to let his music do the talking. His onstage stories and shaggy dog tales have long entertained his fans, but his songs and his guitar provide the most direct line to their hearts. Considering his prominence on the rock 'n' roll landscape, Springsteen has spent remarkably little of his 40-year recording career speaking to the press. But when he does decide to sit down and talk, the conversations tend to be momentous. Q&As with Bruce Springsteen reveal an artist with great insight and self-awareness, a student of music, an avid searcher, an astute observer of humanity from the boardwalk to America at large. Much has been written about the Boss, but few can be said to know the man as well as he knows himself, and the best of Springsteen's own words are collected here in Talk About a Dream. Gathering more than 30 different interviews spanning from 1973 to 2013, this volume captures his remarkable personality-one that takes interviews as seriously as making music. These eye-opening conversations chart Springsteen's development as an artist, a thinker, and a public figure, shedding light on everything from the meaning of lyrics to his evolution from rebel rocker to global icon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781620400739

Book preview

63.

Barbara Schoenweis

The Asbury Park Evening Press, February 9, 1973

Springsteen’s first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., was released January 5, 1973. A month later he spoke with his hometown paper. Twenty-three years old, Springsteen was already a veteran of the Jersey Shore club scene. Some of the key themes to his early career are already here: his anxiety over being part of a big company and not having control, his insistence on playing good music, the comparisons to Bob Dylan, and his desire to be honest about what he is doing. Barbara Schoenweis notes that his songs have an urgency that is typical of his generation, and more so, of Bruce himself.

Springsteen Takes City Aloft

Music put Asbury Park on the map about 30 years ago when Frank Sinatra asked Is it Grenada I see or only Asbury Park?

Well, it’s back on the map again in a more contemporary version with Bruce Springsteen’s new LP for Columbia Records, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. The jacket is a blow-up of a popular color postcard found among the city’s famous boardwalk’s stands.

Bruce, who hails from Freehold and moved here when he was 18, has been singing and playing guitar in the area for nearly 10 of his 23 years, both on his own and with bands like Steel Mill. And now on his way to the top, he’ll be stopping at the Sunshine Inn tomorrow night to perform for his loyal and local fans. Then it’s off to California for six weeks where he’ll be on bills with groups like the Beach Boys, Paul Butterfield, and others. He recently finished a week’s gig at Max’s Kansas City, New York, which he says was an unusual experience because the crowd really came to listen to him and his band.

On one of his rare stays at his apartment in Bradley Beach, he visited The Press to talk about what it’s been like being pushed into the limelight in less than six weeks. Dressed in a tattered green leather jacket, jeans, a wrinkled shirt, and lace-up boots, he hardly looks like the picture of upcoming fame and fortune. He does not seem impressed, either, by the machinery that has put him where he is, only somewhat shaken up by it.

There’s a lot of confusion, he says, about how it’s been since his friend and local manager Tinker (Carl West) introduced him to Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos in New York and how from there he met John Hammond who got him on the Columbia label.

He’s the same guy who introduced Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan, says Bruce. The man knows his business.

It’s weird working for a big company, though, he mumbled in a characteristically sullen manner. It was like pulling teeth to get me to sign. You’re not your own man anymore. But you can always get up and walk away from it all. What can they do, sue me for my shoes? I ain’t got nothin’ else.

Of course, he admits, his attitude toward this whole new world changes each day with whether he’s eaten and slept well.

Some days you think when you start making a record, people drive you nuts, he says. Somehow it all comes back to money. And then other days you meet some really great people and it seems all worth it and terrific.

On the way to where he is now, Bruce spent his time playing back street clubs and bars in the area for pin money, and made himself a respected but controversial reputation, because he believed in being honest with his audience and doing only music he thought was good.

I broke up a lot of bands in my day, he admits with a wry grin, because I’d get up there and start playing junk with them, and all of a sudden in the middle of it all, I’d just stop and say, ‘What is this jive?’

All you can ask of a person is that he’s honest about what he’s doing. I hope I’ll never change in that respect, he continues. The world does not need another four-piece rock ’n’ roll band, and the market needs less to be flooded with more junk.

When you ask Bruce what his music is all about (he wrote and arranged and plays all nine songs on his album), he tells you to listen to the record. When you ask him about his background, he tells you that he doesn’t go in for a personality image, that it’s his music that should stand or fall on its own.

His music style is not unlike Bob Dylan’s in mood and sound, but it is also unique in the way he puts words and sounds together. His tunes are not melodic but they have a drive, an urgency that is typical of his generation, and more so, of Bruce himself. His lyrics go from poetic and highly intelligible to wanderings of a way-out mind or a bad trip.

Among the best songs on the album is Lost in the Flood, a piece which marries the hypocrisy of the Vietnam War to the hypocrisy of our everyday lives. Bruce has a knack for bringing things to light in vivid images, some of which are drawn from local landmarks and the landmarks of his past.

The ragamuffin gunner is returning home like a hungry runaway.

He walks through the town all alone

He must be from the fort he hears the high school girls say.

His countryside’s burnin’ with wolfman fairies dressed in drag for homicide

The hit and run, plead sanctuary ’neath a holy stone they hide.

They’re breakin’ beams and crosses with a spastic’s reelin’ perfection

Nuns run bald through Vatican halls pregnant, pleadin’ immaculate conception.

And everybody’s wrecked on Main Street from drinking unholy blood.

And then there’s what Bruce does admit to as his nothing songs:

Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teen-age diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat. With a bolder on my shoulder, feelin’ kinda older I tripped the merry-go-round. With this very unpleasing sneezing and wheezing the calliope crashed to the ground.

He plays the acoustic, electric guitars, and bass as well as the harmonica on his album. He’s a self-taught musician, who can read music a little and who started playing piano when his grandfather gave him one at age 14.

It was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me, he says.

Bruce is backed up by a group of local musicians who, at this point, have no trade name. They are Vincent Lopez on drums, Clarence Clemons on sax and background vocals, Garry Tallent, bass, David Sancious, piano and organ. Harold Wheeler and Richard Davis fill in on piano and bass in a couple of songs.

What’s different about Bruce’s songs that made him catch the ears of the music world?

Well, it’s me, he says.

And about the future?

It’s a waste of time to think about it, he comments. I’d rather think about my music.

Robert Hilburn

Melody Maker, August 24, 1974

Like many critics, Robert Hilburn discovered Springsteen early on and became an enthusiastic supporter. Music editor at the Los Angeles Times, Hilburn made sure that LA audiences heard about the shows at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and the Troubadour in July 1974 and were primed for a series of historic shows Bruce would perform at the Roxy in October 1975. With his first two albums out, Bruce admits the writing is more difficult now. He was working on what would be his make-or-break third album, and he was feeling the pressure. You have to let out more of yourself all the time. You strip off the first layer, then the second, then the third. It gets harder because it’s more personal.

The writing is more difficult now, said Bruce Springsteen, the hot new, much acclaimed American singer-songwriter, as he sat in his modest hotel room (he isn’t booking suites yet) after a Santa Monica Civic Auditorium [show] and tried to put his suddenly accelerating career into perspective.

"I got a lot of things out in that first album. I let out an incredible amount of things at once—a million things in each song. They were written in half hour, 15 minute blasts. I don’t know where they came from. A few of them I worked on for a week or so, but most of them were just jets, a real energy situation.

"I had all that stuff stored up for years because there was no outlet in the bars I had been playing because no-one’s listening in a bar and if they are, you’ve got a low PA [system] and they can’t hear the words anyway. So, the first album was a big outlet.

On the second album, I started slowly to find out who I am and where I want to be. It was like coming out of the shadow of various influences and trying to be me, continued the 24-year-old who bears a startling facial resemblance to Bob Dylan on stage.

You have to let out more of yourself all the time. You strip off the first layer, then the second, then the third. It gets harder because it’s more personal.

Though Springsteen had received three standing ovations at the evening’s concert, he was still vaguely displeased with the show. Because he was the opening act (for Dr. John), he had been limited to 45 minutes. Too short, he felt.

It was like we didn’t even play at all, he muttered in his slightly shy, hesitant way. It reminded me of the time we toured with Chicago. We got introduced, walked on stage, blinked and that was it. It’s hard to show an audience what the band is about in that little time.

But Springsteen had salvaged some of the evening for himself through his choice of an encore number. For most of the show, he and his five-piece band had given the audience uptempo tunes—songs bristling with the fire, energy, passion and sensualness of the New York and New Jersey streets of his youth.

For the encore, however, he played the slow, disarming New York Serenade, a tune that detracted from rather than added to the strong energy level that had been building in the auditorium.

The applause was clearly less when he finished that song than it would have been if he had given the audience another boogie number. But Springsteen had known it would happen and, unlike many young performers eager for the strongest possible applause, he had done it anyway.

Springsteen is shooting for high stakes in rock and he knows there are no short cuts. By doing New York Serenade, he was telling the audience and reminding himself that the song is just as much of his music as the uptempo numbers.

It’s a combination the public ultimately is going to have to accept or reject so why not, he figured, lay it on the line now.

I thought it was important to do that song, he said. "It completed the set for me. It might get more response to do a boom-boom thing and really rock the joint, but when I walked down the steps afterward I felt complete. Otherwise, I feel messed up.

"It’s just being honest with the audience and with myself, I guess. You can’t conform to the formula of always giving the audience what it wants or you’re killing yourself and you’re killing the audience.

Because they don’t really want it either. Just because they respond to something doesn’t mean they want it. I think it has come to the point where they respond automatically to things they think they should respond to. You’ve got to give them more than that.

Springsteen, who began playing in rock bands around his native New Jersey while in his early teens, burst onto the national pop music scene in 1972 with an album (Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.) that reminded you of Dylan because of its machine-gun barrage of surrealistic lyrics, such as these from Blinded By the Light.

Some brimstone baritone anti-cyclone rolling stone preacher from the east.

He says, Dethrone the Dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone. That’s where they expect it the least.

Because the album stressed lyrics more than music (Columbia had originally encouraged him to simply record the songs with a guitar backing, but he insisted on using a band), Springsteen was immediately thrown into the folk-flavoured, singer-songwriter category where some began hailing him—along with John Prine, Elliott Murphy, Jackson Browne and Loudon Wainwright III—as the new Dylan. His second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, made enormous strides towards giving Springsteen that separate identity.

Without sacrificing the surrealistic lyrics, both his themes—normally reflecting the innocence, wonder, frustrations, urgency of youth—were more disciplined and his musical backing bolder than in the first album.

In a song like Sandy, Springsteen brings together several of his themes, set against the natural illusion/fantasy setting of an amusement park:

Sandy, the fireworks are hailing over little Eden tonight.

Forcing a light into all those stoney faces left stranded on this warm July …

And the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore

Chasin’ those silly New York virgins by the score …

Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie

For telling fortunes better than they do …

What Springsteen does is compress a broad collection of scenes into song, leaving the listener to draw his own truths, realities. He, thus, provides a puzzle for his audience to assemble. Clues, rather than the answers.

There’s a certain understatement that is important to maintain, he explained—speaking slowly—a bit uncertain about how much an artist should reveal of himself.

People don’t want to see things in black and white, he continued. Songs have to have possibilities. You have to let the audience search it out for themselves. You can’t say, ‘Here it is. This is exactly what I mean’ and give it to them. You have to let them search.

Despite his reluctant, withdrawn manner off-stage, Springsteen brings a sense of drama with him on stage. It’s not the staged theatrics of an Alice Cooper, but the strong sense of a powerful, charismatic performer. He has the same cold, intent, determined, uncompromising stance that Dylan brings on stage.

Wearing a white undershirt (not a T-shirt) and black pants that underscore the street roots of his music, Springsteen, also wearing dark glasses that make his music all the more mysterious, attacks the microphone with a sudden barrage of words, retreats like a prizefighter to a neutral corner as the band plays, then returns for another assault.

On the second number, he picks up an electric guitar and later, more in the style of Elvis than Dylan, points the neck to the ceiling and twists his way across stage. It was done more in the sense of relieving tension in his music than, as Elvis would have done, to elicit shrieks from female fans.

Springsteen’s no sex symbol. He’s more a challenger, a stimulator of thoughts and emotions.

Despite the many Dylan comparisons, it was Presley who first pushed Springsteen toward music. He remembers seeing Elvis on the old Ed Sullivan television show. Springsteen was just nine at the time, but asked his mother for a guitar. She got him the guitar but also made him take lessons which he hated so much he ended up discarding the guitar.

It wasn’t until the Beatles arrived in 1964 that he picked up the guitar again. This time he taught himself how to play. Within six months he had formed his first band.

Before that I didn’t have any purpose. I tried to play football and baseball and all those things. I checked out all the alleys and just didn’t fit. I was running through a maze. Music gave me something. It was a reason to live.

Over the next few years, Springsteen was in and out of several bands, eventually moving from school dances to bars, clubs and even a couple of cross-country tours. He played the Fillmore West in San Francisco when he was 18 and auditioned for Fillmore Records while on the coast but was turned down. He was signed by Columbia in 1972.

I never got into being discouraged because I never got into hoping, he said with a laugh. "When I was a kid, I never got used to expecting success. I got used to failing.

"Once you do that, the rest is easy. It took a lot of pressure off. I just said, ‘Hell, I’m a loser. I don’t have to worry about anything.’ I assumed immediately nothing was happening.

But that’s not the same, he said, pausing to emphasize the difference in concepts, as giving up. You keep trying, but you don’t count on things. It can be a strength. Because I know some people who sweat out winning so much it kills them. So in the end, they lose anyway. They win, but they lose.

He’s now looking forward to recording his third album and expanding his band (it now includes organ, piano, saxophone, guitar, bass, drums) with more horns. Unlike most of his songwriting contemporaries, he prizes the music as much as the lyrics.

You’ve got to work on the different levels, he said.

Ed Sciaky

WMMR, November 3, 1974

Ed Sciaky, of WMMR Philadelphia, was one of the first disc jockeys to champion Springsteen; the impact of that support in what would become the career-long fan stronghold of Philly can’t be overestimated. For this, one of their many on-air chats, Sciaky was surprised not only that Bruce actually showed up at the studio the day after a Tower Theater show, but that he also brought along several others members of the band. On the one hand, Springsteen isn’t so much forthcoming in this setting; on the other, he’s clearly relaxed and enjoying himself. With plenty of goofing around, he even does an on-air advertisement for Santori wine and ad-libs you can pour it all over your face. More consequentially, Springsteen brought along a tape of Born to Run, his new song that would be released the following summer. It is the studio recording’s worldwide premiere. Asked how he likes hearing it on the radio, Bruce only responds, Do I get to do another commercial.

I’m sure a lot of people would like to know the honest and true story of the actual history of you and the bands and so on. When you started and all that stuff. Also I’ll mention that you told me once you don’t really like to do interviews.

It’s the same old story.

That’s why I really appreciate you coming down here today.

It’s the same as everything else, every other kid, 13, pick up the guitar, scrub away on it. I had a succession of every sort of band you could imagine. Ten piece bands, three piece bands, power trios. Everything. We played down in Virginia a lot. That’s where we made our living, between Virginia and New Jersey.

One day I was sitting on my porch and this guy said, Hey, come on up to New York and meet this guy. I said, Nah, I don’t want to go to New York, I don’t want to meet this guy. A week or so later he came by and said I’m coming up tonight, it’s a nice night. I was totally bored so I said okay and I got in the car and met Mike [Appel]. He said, I want to be your manager. I said I’d think about it. I went away for about five months. I went to California.

How old were you at this time?

I don’t know. Jesus, I must have been, this must have happened when I was about 22. Twenty-one or 22.

And how old are you now?

I’m 25 [laughter in studio].

Looking back on your youth, Bruce.

Good idea, let’s look back on it.

You had a band called the Steel Mill. Was that the name at the time? Were there other names?

There were other names.

But you never made any records. Just kind of hung around the bars?

I did make one when I was about 16. I made it in Bricktown, New Jersey, in this country and western studio.

Was it released?

No. It was released to the extent that for $100 you get a hundred of them.

Do you have any left?

I have one that doesn’t play very well.

What was the tune?

I don’t know. I did that when I was about 16. That’s about it.

[Sciaky asked about Springsteen’s audition for John Hammond]

I had this guitar, this little guitar. Its neck was broke when I brought it up into the office. I was brought there by the guy that is my manager now and at the time I always took the attitude that nothing was going to come of anything because that’s usually the way it always worked out. I had been playing down in Jersey in the bars for like nine years.

Wow, that long?

Yeah, and I heard some good bands down there. And, Hey I’m going to bring down the manager to see you guys tonight and you sit there until three in the morning. Anyhow, I went up there, and we went in and I introduced myself and met the guy and sat down. And my manager, he jumped up and started to give him this big hype already. I didn’t play a note! I said, Oh no. So I played a few things. I played Saint in the City, and he liked it. He was really enthusiastic about it, and we went in the studio with him and we did 13 or 14 songs on demo tape with him. And that was, like, the day that never comes. I felt like I was going to go outside and get hit by a car after that.

It was all over, right?

Yeah. That’s what I figured. Yeah, that was a day.

[At some point, Bruce took over doing an on-air promotion for Akadama Wines.]

Santori Akadama. [He reads note from Sciaky.] Feel free to ad lib. There are lots of ways you can enjoy Santori Akadama wine. Did you know that, Ed? You can drink it chilled. You can drink it on the rocks with ice and soda. You can pour it all over your face. Akadama red wine makes a fine sangria, it says right here. You can own one square of English earth, oh, wrong commercial. Akadama red wine and orange juice is one of the better ways to start the day. Goes great with apple juice, ginger ale, tonic water….

That’s all they have time for.

How am I doing, fellas?

That’s all the time they paid for.

Must read, it says here at the bottom.

Read that.

These guys are gonna be mad. Akadama wines are imported … Oh, this part. And don’t forget to pass the Akadema [laughter] … They spelled it wrong!

It is imported by Santori International. They used to be one of our sponsors. What better authority on wine than Bruce Springsteen to surprise us here. You’ve drunk a bottle of wine in your time, Bruce.

No, I hate wine. You don’t like wine? Okay.

Believe it or not, Bruce is actually here. I didn’t know if you were going to make it, Bruce. You didn’t seem too enthusiastic last night about getting out today.

Yeah, it’s hard to tell.

Well we are going to start off by playing the tune—you have not heard it yet on the radio.

No I haven’t.

One called Born to Run. Well, I’ve been waiting. I’ve had some calls on it, but just in case you came here today I thought I’d save it and play it. Go out into the hall and you can listen to it on the little radio—go ahead out there. All go out in the hall now. Now while Bruce can’t hear me [laughter] … No, Bruce can hear me. Bruce I hope you are out there. He hasn’t heard it on the radio. And there’s a thing about hearing a song in the studio it sounds a lot different than when you get it onto your little transistor radio. Everyone knows that out on the beach at Asbury you’ve got to hear it on the radio and that’s how you know how it sounds. So here it is, Born to Run on a small radio. [Song plays]

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen. I like it. How do you like it, Bruce?

Do I get to do another commercial?

No, not yet. So what have you been doing with yourself, Bruce? Making a new record?

Yeah, yeah, make another album. Working on my band, working with my band. Trying to make it better. That’s about it. Going to Texas after tonight. I guess we go to Texas tomorrow.

How you going? You going to fly?

In the magic bus.

You going in the magic bus huh? They got a spiffy green bus, I’ve got to say it’s real nice.

Sort of Exorcist green.

How long do you think it will take you to drive to Texas?

I don’t know.

When’s your gig?

I don’t know that either.

You don’t know where you’re going, but you know where you’re coming from, I guess. We have Max [Weinberg] and Roy [Bittan] with us here. And Garry [Tallent] also. Max and Roy, the new guys on the block. Say hello. [Shouts of hello]

That’s Max, and that’s Roy [laughter].

Max is a drummer, and Roy is a piano player. I was telling you that people were concerned about what was happening with you and the band, and I can tell them that everything is working out fine including your new violin player.

That’s Suki. The guy who does the engineering on the album, on our albums, Louis Lahav, that’s his wife. And she’s a girl, she did all the voices on Sandy. She sings all the background on Sandy on the Wild, the Innocent album. She’s been playing with us for two, three weeks. It sounded nice.

Come on in, Garry. Garry is one of the old guys. He’s been around for a while. All sorts of folks here today. We’ve talked, not here on the air, a lot about what Bruce is into and how long it’s taken for Bruce to break out nationally and it’s gotta happen soon.

Why, why.

You don’t care too much, huh.

Uh, you know.

You’re pretty mellow about it, I guess. But the people who are enthusiastic about you really want it to go real big so everybody will know about you. Do you want everybody to know about you, Bruce?

I don’t think about it that much, about that aspect of it. What happens now is when you are doing gigs like last night, which is really nice, really nice gig, the audience was a great audience. And we just came from Boston where we got a nice reception up there too. But we actually haven’t ever been in the Midwest at all. I don’t think the records get played out there at all. You can’t concern yourself about too many of those kinds of things. Business is tough enough. You can’t get the music straight, can’t get it clear enough.

Do you have time to write still? You play an awful lot.

Now we do Jungleland, that’s a new song. We do She’s the One, that’s a new song. A Love So Fine, that’s a new song.

Which used to be something else.

I’ve got about six other things that we’re gonna work on. So there’s time. It manifests itself when it does.

[Sciaky asks about other songs Springsteen performs.]

We pick up different things. We do different songs all the time. We’ve been doing a Crystals song.

And Then He Kissed Me.

What else have we been doing? Spanish Harlem we’ve been doing.

Spanish Harlem is real good, real good. I half expected you to go into Rosalita right after that, but it wasn’t the right place for it.

Well next time you run up and cue me [laughter].

Bruce Springsteen is here and the phones are just jammed.

In New Jersey the number is Bigelow 8.

Please pledge your money so that this struggling rock star can go on to Texas. Have you heard this one, this is a tune called [If I Was the Priest].

That’s not what it’s called.

What is it called?

It has no name. This song I wrote, we did it about four years ago, we did it in the Prince, we did this in the Student Prince, which is a bar we used to play down in Jersey. I wrote it about four years ago. Thought I’d burned every copy. Somebody got a hold of it.

What we are talking about is it is on the new Allan Clarke album, it’s only available in England.

But there’s one part that’s great, when the harmonies come in he does these great Hollies harmonies.

They call it If I Were the Priest? You ever going to do that tune?

No, I wrote it four years ago and we used to play it in the bar. No, we’re not going to do that one.

But just the fact that this one popped up.

The harmonies are great. I love the harmonies he put on that.

There must be a whole raft of old material that you wrote that we never heard.

Yeah, most of it I burn. It’s things that aren’t really indicative of where I want to be or where I’m trying to go. I think the only stuff they send around now is the material on the two albums.

Have you had anybody else record any of these tunes? Did I hear about Bowie recording something?

Supposedly. I haven’t heard it yet. Supposedly he did Saint in the City and Growin’ Up. The Hollies did Sandy. I heard that the other day.

Where do you put your songwriting as opposed to your performing?

It’s all in one. It’s all connected. I don’t like to separate it. I don’t really like to think of myself as a songwriter or just as a performer. Whatever. I don’t know. That’s a weird question, Ed.

I think it is part of it. Obviously your material reflects who you are. Your performing is really important to why people have come to appreciate you so much.

What it does, in performance, things crystallize. To know what I am trying to do and what the band is you have to see it. It’s hard to have a complete understanding just off the record.

What about when somebody else does your tune?

It’s hard which is why not too many people have done any of the songs at all. Because they are like fairly personalized numbers and it is hard for people to get a reasonable approach to take towards it. There’s not a whole lot of approaches that can be had towards the songs.

But a lot of them stand up by themselves. It’s hard to think of them without thinking of you. But I’m sure if somebody else tried to do Saint in the City they could do it, because it is a good song.

For some reason I always imagined Joe Cocker doing Spirit in the Night. When I wrote the song I had his kind of voice in mind which is something that I rarely do.

Give us a little bit of Cocker doing it, how would you imagine that?

I wouldn’t imagine it.

Going to play an old tune here. What is this tune, The Fever?

What is this? It’s an old demo tape that you got. I don’t know where. It’s something we did a couple years ago, a little after the first album. It was done as a demo for other artists. It was done in one take.

Who played on this?

Who played on it: Me. Danny, Clarence, Mad Dog Vini [Lopez], Garry.

And Mad Dog sings the backup.

Mad Dog sings the backup.

I want to thank you for coming down, because I know you don’t like to talk too much about things.

It’s nice down here. It’s been a town where the band has got a lot of incredible support from Philadelphia. Because we are still really scuffling to make it work. And it’s getting better and getting better. And Philadelphia was the first town that really responded.

You better make another record, because this one is getting worn out.

The Lost Interviews, 1975

The following interviews date to 1975, both pre- and post -Born to Run. Little is known about their provenance; unearthed by Backstreets magazine in the ’90s, they were professionally recorded, conducted by European journalists (likely for promotion, as Springsteen would cross the ocean for the first time that fall), and stored in a record company vault. They are remarkably personal and revealing—speaking with a Swedish interviewer, Springsteen takes great care in describing his background and his concerns for a foreign audience. Having just completed Born to Run, Springsteen confesses, The tension making that record I could never describe. It was killing, almost, it was inhuman. I hated it. I couldn’t stand it. It was the worst, hardest, lousiest thing I ever had to do. Excerpts from the interviews appeared originally in Backstreets magazines #57 and #58, Winter 1997 and Spring 1998.

Tell us a little bit about Asbury Park, and E Street, because that’s one thing we don’t know anything about.

I guess you must have coastal canals? Boardwalks, fast wheels driving around? That’s what it is. It’s a small, sort of has-been resort town, where mostly older people go and people that ain’t got enough money to go burn gas and go farther south to a bigger resort town, they stop there. It’s okay, it’s nice, I liked it, I lived there for quite a while. E Street, that’s just a street … [it’s] where my piano player, who played with me on the first two albums, named Davey Sancious, that’s the street he lived on. We just took the name of the street for the name of the band.

What sort of music did you listen to when you grew up and started to play in small bands?

At the time I listened to whatever was on AM radio. There was no FM, of course. Is there FM in Sweden? There is? Well, at that time there was no FM radio, but the radio had some good music on it. In the early ’60s, when I started playing … Elvis was big then, the Ronettes, all the [Phil] Spector stuff, and the girl groups from New York, which is a big part of my background. The Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Chiffons, who put out a lot of great music at the time. And then the big English thing happened, the Beatles and all that stuff, and the Stones, Manfred Mann …

AM radio was fine right up until about 1967 when FM came in and started to play long cuts, and you could see the disappearance of the really good three-minute single. So the music that got me was what was on AM from 1959 to 1965. And then later on I got into the early ’50s. They had that big San Francisco thing which went down over here; I never got too involved in that. My roots were sort of formed by then: Roy Orbison, the great English singles bands, the girl groups from New York. Chuck Berry, of course—your classics.

You were quite young when you started. Where did you play?

Everywhere. High school dances, bars, weddings. I can remember staying up all night learning Moon River because the bride requested it—Moon River! [laughs] We didn’t play any of that stuff at the time, but we needed the bucks, right?

First thing I ever did was in a trailer camp, out in the country. It was the fall, with trailer camp people. Ain’t got no trailer camps in Sweden? Motor homes, like you pull them with your car. You know America, everybody’s moving all over all the damn time. Trailer camps … you pull ’em and you park ’em. And there’s a certain trailer camp type of person, right? We played there, and it was us and this other country music band who had an accordion, a bass guitar, a guitar player, and a little girl who stood on a stool and sang into one of these big RCA/Victor microphones, like in them old Shirley Temple movies … And we came out and we did Twist and Shout and Ray Charles songs and Chuck Berry songs. And the people went nuts … and man, we played for like eight hours that day. I remember starting at noon and we played until like eight or nine, when we had to stop. That was one of the first gigs I ever did.

So I was doing everything. I played for the fireman’s ball, where they didn’t know what kind of band they were hiring, and we’d get there and just blow everybody’s mind. The fireman’s ball, played for the Boy Scouts once, did every kind of gig. High school dances, clubs, anything, we did it. Played in the mental institutions, for the patients—everything.

Where did you get your musicians? Was it all people that you knew growing up?

This guy Miami Steve is a guy that I knew since I was about 15. Steve had his own band, I had my own band. I just got him in the band a few months ago, but he’d been in all my bands except for this one. So it was good to get him back in. So I’ve known him a long time; Garry, I’ve known Garry for about five years now, I guess, and he’s been in other bands with me. Danny I’ve known for six or seven years. They’re all people I’ve known. Clarence I met about three or four years ago. Most of them local boys, except for Max and Roy. Roy’s from Long Island, and Max is from North Jersey—which is not considered local [laughs]. Local is your town, maybe ten miles out. North Jersey is a whole other scene from where I live—it’s industrial, more like New York.

With that very strong local feeling, you must be interested in the same things and have the same sort of associations and jokes and everything like that.

Well, no, not really; everybody’s sort of different. Everybody’s been through different things, different ages, different experiences. But there’s a real strong vibe there, because everybody realizes we’ve got a really good thing going. And they’re all good guys, very easygoing nice guys, and it’s a very smooth-running thing right now. So yeah, to a degree, everybody knows New Jersey—when you got your local boys with you, you’ve got a thing you just can’t buy. I wouldn’t trade these guys for nobody. First of all because they all are great musicians, and there’s that extra thing.

Like me and Steve do that rap in E Street Shuffle, and that’s what it was like. We sat at that table in that club at three in the morning, and we dreamed and dreamed the day would come when we could make some records. That was number one. I’ve known Steve since he was about 15, and since then it’s been the same thing—that’s all we ever talked about. All we ever wanted to do was make a record. And we’d say, what’s the matter with us? We’re as good as those guys, we’re as good as those guys, how come we ain’t got a record deal? What’s going on?

And it’s funny, because the other day we were riding somewhere, like coming down here, and everybody was so excited: there we were, playing on the [radio]. We used to trudge around in this old van, me and Steve riding up and down the East Coast, riding to Virginia and Atlanta, all these different towns, just scrubbing away, and that damn van was breaking down all the time … and now here we were on the air. And I said Steve. And he said Yeah! And I said, This is it! Remember all those towns, we’d be riding in the van saying ‘when this happens, when this happens …’ —and I never stopped to think that it was happening. And him either. But it’s something that I’d never take for granted, not for a second. Like last night with that crowd in that hall, I’d never take that for granted. For every night like last night, there were a hundred other nights that we played in these little bars in Jersey, and there was nobody there.

What did your family and schoolteachers think about you in the early years, playing guitar in bars?

Oh, they hated it. My mother—you know, your mother’s your mother. And she tries to be cool with you and let you do your thing. My father, he hated it, couldn’t stand it, wanted me to stop. Always was down on it. Wanted me to be a lawyer, some kind of heavy thing—a doctor. Guaranteed income. But I was a stubborn and strong kid, did what I wanted to do and just figured I could do it. Eventually they moved away, and before they knew it, it was happening.

You’ve talk about influences; how influenced are you, as you see it yourself, by rhythm & blues and Latin American songs?

I would say that I’m the kind of guy that whatever goes in my ear I digest. But I’m not a big looker; I don’t go around looking for it. I’m not a big record collector, I’m not real familiar with the old R&B artists. But whatever I hear I digest very quickly, and it comes right back out the way I want it to. All the Stax stuff and Atlantic stuff, I’m very into that. Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, the MGs, Steve Cropper … yeah, the band has moments when it’s based a lot on those rhythm & blues bands, especially in the way I use the band. If you see Otis Redding in Monterey Pop, the way he uses his band; the way James Brown uses his band. Because most of your better bandleaders have all been your soul bandleaders.

Because the white guys always tend to be a little too sloppy, too lazy; they think it’s part of the act to be not together or something, I don’t know. The best bandleaders of the last ten, twenty years, from what I’ve listened to, have been your soul bandleaders. They whip them bands into shape. I tend to use my band that way. I’m doing different things, but in that tradition … Ain’t nobody does it better than them soul artists. Like Sam and Dave, James Brown. James Brown is an idol, man … he spits, and those guys do somersaults. It’s incredible.

You don’t write what you could call ordinary love songs; it’s more about life, and you could read the lyrics without listening to the music and you’d get some sort of picture about life.

That’s what some people say. [When] I write the songs, I write them to stand up as song lyrics. You’re supposed to listen to the song and hear the lyrics. You’re not supposed to read the lyrics, because they’re song lyrics. They go to a song, you know? That’s the idea. I’m a songwriter, I’m not a poetry man. That’s what I concern myself with. They describe whatever I write into them: just what I know about, what I grew up with.

Could you talk a little bit, from an autobiographical standpoint, about your background?

A screw-up, in a small town. I ran away a mess of times, and to New York all the time and stayed there, and played in the Café Wha? down in the West Village, banged around down there for a few years. Met some people and my parents moved away and I stayed around here and I just kept playing. I just played and hung around. Went to school, to high school, that’s about it. That’s the capsule version.

What do you think about getting so much coverage right now? Critics really respond to your music.

I don’t know. I guess it’s good. It’s nice—okay, it’s dynamite. But I don’t get hooked up in it or involved in it, because papers are just papers. I don’t know how much they influence people; we get a lot of coverage, we get a lot of reviews, but all I know is I still make $115 a week, I still live in New Jersey. The main thing is I’m glad I’ve got a good band, and I can have jobs to play and some things to do, and I get to travel around. I don’t know anything about the press, and what’s going on with them.

But, I mean, suddenly you are recognized.

Well, I don’t know if it’s real sudden. Two years ago when I recorded my first album it was a big deal, then it cooled out and the record company cooled out on us and didn’t want to promote our second album. Then they decided they did want to promote the second album. Then we played in New York, and I hadn’t played in New York in a while, and the band had changed a lot. I don’t know, it’s like I’m getting better.

Why didn’t they want to promote the second album?

A million reasons, a million reasons that were like no reason at all. I guess somebody didn’t believe in it, didn’t think it was right. It was business. See, in the end, it doesn’t matter. That’s the funny thing people don’t realize, is that, all right, so you don’t get promoted, and this doesn’t happen and that doesn’t happen, but in the end it doesn’t matter. If you’ve got the music and you’ve got something—the music and—then that’s it. If you’re going to win, you’re going to win. No matter what. Say the second album didn’t get promoted, which it didn’t at first. But it came out, and it got a lot of good reviews in the press, so they couldn’t keep it down. There weren’t any ads, but it was written about all the time. So I don’t necessarily even believe in ads. I hate all those ads—I haven’t seen an ad of mine that I like. It’s unnecessary. They hype you, and they don’t have to. When they’re dealing with a certain type of artist, there shouldn’t be any need for that whole hype attitude. If you’re dealing with certain people who can’t play [laughs], you better hype ’em because they ain’t gonna make it! But if you’re just dealing with people who are in control, who are good, then it’s not necessary because the music speaks for itself. That’s why it’s unnecessary even for me to talk about any of this stuff, because the music speaks for itself. There’s nothing I can possibly say that could add or give any insight to it.

Where did you learn to write songs and lyrics?

I never learned. You don’t learn any of that stuff. I don’t know about learnin’. I don’t believe in learnin’ [laughs]. You just do it, that’s all. I can do it. I mean, I learned how to write in first grade, but besides that … I can do it. I woke up one day and started to write some songs when I was, I don’t know, 13 or 14 years old. At first they were pretty lousy. And I just kept writing and writing. It’s not something you can learn, you just do it.

How much personal experience went into your songs?

I don’t know, it’s all based on that. There ain’t a word or a note played that didn’t come from something that happened to me somewhere long the line. It depends on how literally you want to take the whole situation, but it’s all based on personal experience directly or indirectly. You change it around—you change the names to protect the innocent [laughs], stuff like that.

Can you give me any examples? I like 4th of July, Asbury Park. What kind of personal experience inspired that?

Well, I live in Asbury Park! I’ve lived there for a while now. I live like a block from the boardwalk. Before I was doing anything—okay, the past two years I’ve been busy, the past year and a half. But before that, I wasn’t doing anything. I scraped up gigs here and there, and I had a lot of free time. At night that’s what you do: you hang out down there. And you meet people, and you see things, and that was it. I don’t want to say there was this girl, there was this and that, you know.

Let’s put it this way: what does Asbury Park mean for people who were growing up in New Jersey or in the neighborhood where you grew up?

Doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just a dumpy town. It doesn’t mean anything.

But it’s probably a meeting-place for people, isn’t it?

There’s the boardwalk, people are always attracted to the bright lights, and the rides, the games and, yeah, a lot of people down there. It’s where the kids go, it’s where we all go at night. I used to go there a lot more than I do now; I’ve hardly been there this summer at all.

How about New York City? You’ve written a lot about it, how do you see the difference between the two?

New York City, for me, was a place where I could be myself. It was real tough down in Asbury; being like 16 or 15, you come to the city, step out of the bus, and you’re somebody else. Or you’re who you are. It was escape, a good escape. From my parents, and the kids and everything, from the whole scene. And I come to New York and it’s overwhelming. When you’re there, without a thing to do, no money but a few bucks, and you step out of that bus, it’s just an overwhelming thing. I just dug the feeling of it.

And you put that into your music, like Does That Bus Stop on 82nd Street?

I wrote that on the bus!

And New York City Serenade. How did you come to that song?

Part of it had been sitting around for about a year, a verse or two, and then that song just came together pretty quick, in a day or so. A lot of the songs did like that. These are things that just mean a lot to me. This is my life, and the songs are usually parts of my life that I want to remember. Even though they’re born, probably, out of the parts of my life that I’d most like to forget. The moments I write down are the ones that I want to remember. That’s confusing, maybe.

So growing up in Asbury Park, but near the city …

You’ve got a little more room. That was one thing I was fortunate to have, when I was a kid, there was always the option of splitting to the city, I could come into New York, and when it got too much for me I could go back. There were a lot of cats that just didn’t have that particular option. So I sort of was able to choose the best of both worlds. Which is why I can write optimistically about a lot of tough subjects. I can write about how good it is to be in the city in the summer, while a lot of people get trapped in there. I always had the option: I could run there to get away from here, and I could run here to get away from there.

You’re going to prepare another album now, what’s that going to be like?

I write a lot during recording, I get those blasts of energy. Some new songs. We’ve been